Costas Simitis, a former prime minister of Greece who oversaw his country’s entry into the euro single currency and its uneven preparations for the 2004 Olympic Games, died on Sunday at a hospital in Corinth, Greece. He was 88.
Grigoris Karpouzis, the hospital’s director, confirmed his death in a statement but did not give a cause. The Greek government declared four days of national mourning for Mr. Simitis, who will receive a state burial.
A low-key politician who proved popular with voters, Mr. Simitis demonstrated more sympathy for capitalism and the United States than some of his predecessors as prime minister. His two successive premierships yielded the longest continuous term of any modern Greek prime minister, although the man he succeeded, Andreas Papandreou, served a longer total over three terms separated by a period in opposition.
Both the hosting of the Games and the adoption of the euro in 2001 seemed to betoken an unaccustomed self-confidence, optimism and national pride among Greeks.
Yet, in a land whose ancient Greek forebears coined the notion of hubris as a potent ingredient of tragedy, both developments contributed to a crippling debt crisis that raised questions about Greek membership in the European Union and ballooned into a broader crisis across the eurozone.
The Summer Olympics, held shortly after Mr. Simitis left office in March 2004, were billed as a homecoming, not only to the venue of the inaugural modern Olympics in 1896, but also to the birthplace of the ancient games in 776 B.C.
But the 17 days of competition and pageantry cost far more than planned and created yet more debt as a result of big-ticket infrastructure projects designed to showcase Athens as the Games’ host.
Months later, the European Commission criticized Athens for purportedly falsifying economic data in order to replace its drachma currency with the euro. The warning foreshadowed years of crisis and bailouts that forced Greeks into a brutal era of austerity and hardship.
Some international commentators, including Robert Reich, the former U.S. labor secretary, also faulted the Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs, which earned huge fees for advising Greece on measures to reduce the book value of part of its debt in order to qualify for euro membership.
But Mr. Simitis, a trained economist and lawyer who served two four-year terms as prime minister, defended his record, saying Greece did not bear sole responsibility for the debt crisis and arguing that the blame for lax fiscal management lay with the conservative political adversaries who succeeded him.
Specifically, he said in a study of Greece’s role in the European debt crisis, published in 2014, the New Democracy party that won the 2004 elections displayed “criminal indifference” to the need to reduce the country’s public debt and relegated fiscal discipline to the status of “mere window dressing.”
Two years earlier, in an article in The Guardian, as Greece racked up ever greater debts from international bailouts, Mr. Simitis insisted that, when Greece was admitted to the eurozone, leading European institutions had carried out “exhaustive scrutiny” of its economic suitability before endorsing its membership of the new currency.
Not only that, as the eurozone crisis spread to other poorer members of the European Union on its southern periphery, Mr. Simitis wrote, the true cause of the malaise was not “Greece’s alleged extravagance and excessive deficits” but a more fundamental imbalance between the wealthy northern lands, such as Germany, and the less advanced southern economies.
“Greece sparked the eurozone crisis but was not its cause,” Mr. Simitis said. “The cause lies in the fact that the eurozone is a fully fledged monetary union but an incomplete economic and fiscal union of member states with different structures: the more mature economies of the European north and the less mature ones of the European south.”
Konstantinos Simitis was born on June 23, 1936, in the Greek port city of Piraeus near Athens, to Georgios Simitis, a professor at the School of Economic and Commercial Sciences in Athens and his wife, Fani Christopoulou, a left-leaning feminist activist. An elder brother, Spiros Simitis, became a leading jurist specializing in data protection in Germany.
Mr. Simitis is survived by his wife of 60 years, Daphne, and their two daughters, Fiona Mouzakitis and Marilena Simiti.
Mr. Simitis studied in West Germany and in London before returning to Athens, but fled the country to avoid arrest during rule by a military junta from 1967 to 1974. He was a founder of the Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement, known by its Greek initials as PASOK, along with Mr. Papandreou. Mr. Simitis served as a minister under Mr. Papandreou, although the two differed constantly on economic policy.
Mr. Papandreou resigned for health reasons in early 1996, and the party’s 167 parliamentary deputies chose the 59-year-old Mr. Simitis to replace him. He had campaigned in the party ballot as a pro-European modernizer, with a low-key manner that contrasted with his flamboyant predecessor’s patriarchal and sometimes capricious style.
Once in office, Mr. Simitis confronted familiar challenges. Within weeks, a dispute with Turkey sent his popularity ratings into a downward spiral, underscoring the uneasy nature of the relationship between the Aegean neighbors.
On several occasions tensions between the two countries — NATO allies divided by deep historical antagonisms — have stirred powerful nationalist passions and brought them to the brink of hostilities.
In a bizarre episode in 1999, for instance, Mr. Simitis was accused by critics of bungling an attempt to shield Abdullah Ocalan, a fugitive rebel leader of Turkey’s Kurds, who was seized by Turkish security forces in Nairobi, Kenya. Mr. Ocalan had been hiding in the Greek Embassy there.
The event dented Greek national pride. Several government ministers and senior officials resigned. Mr. Simitis acknowledged making mistakes but accused other European nations of triggering the crisis by denying Mr. Ocalan a haven.
In his first term, Mr. Simitis set about curtailing Greece’s extravagant public and private spending and sought to prepare the economy to meet European Union targets for his country’s entry into the eurozone. He had succeeded in reducing inflation and public indebtedness while stabilizing the drachma currency.
His cautious manner offered a marked contrast with the Papandreou years.
“We needed someone who would say less and do more, a person who is an ordinary Greek, who doesn’t descend from on high, and who doesn’t hide problems with endless myths,” Dimitris Rappas, a government spokesman, told The New York Times in 1996.
Mr. Simitis won a second term in 2000, but only by a wafer-thin majority and far short of the endorsement he had sought against his main challenger, Kostas Karamanlis, the leader of the New Democracy Party. It was on Mr. Simitis’s watch, too, that Greece finally made its reckoning with the feared November 17 urban terrorist movement that emerged from a popular struggle against the American-supported military officers who took power in 1967.
In 2002, an injured bomber began to talk and, as a result, the police made a slew of arrests that persuaded the authorities to say that most of the organization had been rounded up. Theodore Couloumbis, a political analyst, said at the time that the country had undergone a “sea change.”
“We’ve crossed the threshold from an unstable democracy to a consolidated one,” he said.
Two years later, though, Mr. Simitis resigned as PASOK chairman and said he would not contest the forthcoming election, in which his party lost to New Democracy. He was succeeded as head of PASOK by George Papandreou, a son of Andreas Papandreou who, at the time, was Greece’s foreign minister.
“Simitis has not made Greece perfect but he has helped make it better,” a largely favorable assessment in the newspaper Ekathimerini said in 2004 as he prepared to step down. “He changed the country and he changed our expectations of our leaders.”
Later, those perceptions of progress collided with the financial crises associated with the eurozone. Only in 2018, did the Greek government say that it was “turning a page” after eight years of riots, bailouts, crisis and instability that brought down four governments.
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